"The more of a commodity PCs become, the more reliance manufacturers will place on brand-name awareness, pricing and market segmentation, " says Stephen.

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Brands that start out with high degrees of loyalty and emotional engagement have something better than high degrees of name awareness, or even high degrees of brand awareness with on-board diagnostics to fall back on.

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"Even though we hadn't used the Amway name in nine years, it still had a 90% brand awareness, compared to 3% from Quixtar, " says Lieberman.

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